Census Bills Gain Despite the Bureau's Protest

By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.

Published: March 18, 1999

WASHINGTON, March 17—
After engaging in heated and partisan debate on how best to manage the 2000 census, a House committee approved several Republican-sponsored bills today over objections by the Census Bureau's director that they would be ''just short of disastrous'' and could even delay the beginning of the count.

The most contentious of the proposals would require the bureau to recount the population of municipalities that challenge its figures. Opponents said this would delay completion of the count by nine weeks, conceivably jeopardizing timely redistricting in some states, and would be less effective than working closely with local governments before the counting begins.

Republicans on the House panel, the Government Reform Committee, said their proposals would insure as accurate a count as possible without recourse to statistical sampling, whose use in the census is opposed by Republicans and was restricted by a Supreme Court ruling in January.

But Democrats accused the sponsors of ''micromanaging'' the Census Bureau and conspiring to bog it down in wasteful operations that they said would do little to correct the undercounting of minorities. The counting of minorities has become a highly divisive issue, mainly because, since they tend to vote Democratic, larger counts of them could benefit Democrats by helping determine the number of seats each state gets in the House and how the lines of Congressional districts are drawn.

''It's clear to me that they are trying to delay the census to death,'' Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of Manhattan, said of the sponsors.

But the chief sponsor, Representative Dan Miller, Republican of Florida, accused the Census Bureau of refusing to come up with plans that did not rely on sampling to get the most accurate count.

The Census Bureau argues that the package of bills approved today would impose complicated and expensive requirements that the agency does not have the time or the money to meet before the count's start, scheduled for April 1 of next year. One provision, for instance, would require repeat mailings to every household that does not respond to the initial one. Another would require that census questionnaires be printed in 31 languages.

The committee's Republican majority brushed aside Democratic pleas that Kenneth Prewitt, the bureau's director, be allowed to testify about his objection to the bills, some of which have never been discussed at a Congressional hearing.

But in a memorandum released by the Democrats, Mr. Prewitt told Commerce Secretary William M. Daley that the changes ''would seriously undermine the ability of the bureau to complete an accurate and timely census.''

And, in a letter to the committee's ranking Democrat, Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, Secretary Daley said he would recommend that President Clinton veto the legislation.

In all, the committee approved seven bills, with almost no support from Democrats and little opposition from Republicans.

Even if the full House approves the bills, they will face substantial resistance in the Senate, where opponents could block a vote with a filibuster. But with disagreements on how to manage the census running so deep, and with the political stakes so high, there is a chance that the House Republican leadership would attach them to an important spending bill, forcing a confrontation with the Administration.

In his memorandum, Mr. Prewitt said the bill that would allow municipal governments to demand an audit of a local census was ''neither timely, effective, nor cost-efficient.'' Audits on demand were permitted in the 1990 census but uncovered little of what were later acknowledged to be significant undercountings.

Since then, Mr. Prewitt said, the bureau has adopted a program in which, before the census begins, local officials update the household addresses that the counters use. He said that twice as many local governments were participating in this program as in the old approach and that these governments accounted for 85 percent of the addresses in the country.